Xeelee: An Omnibus: Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring (140 page)

With a small corner of her mind, she longed to shut this out, to erect some Virtual illusion to hide in.

‘I can see the damn starbow, Uvarov. With my own eyes, right now. We’re decelerating, but we’re still relativistic. We have decades of this journey ahead of us yet . . .’ Was it possible Uvarov had
forgotten
?

In the background she could hear Mark’s voice patiently pleading with the primitive in the pod; her desks showed her endless representations of the processors’ failed attempts to override the pod’s autonomous systems, and the astonishingly rapid convergence of the pod with the Interface.

He pushed the crude control as far forward as it would go. The pod hurtled past the spine. He felt mesmerized, bound up in the extraordinary events around him, beyond any remnants of fear.

Once again a frame of light embraced the pod, expanding, enclosing, like a swallowing mouth. This time, the frame was triangular, not rectangular; it was rimmed by blue light, not silver-white. And it contained - not a bleak, charcoal-grey emptiness - but a pool of golden light, elusive, shimmering.

There were
stars
in that pool. How ironic it was, thought Arrow Maker, that perhaps here at last he would find the stars of which old, mad Uvarov had dreamed.

The ghost-man -
Mark -
was still speaking to him, urgently; but the ghost was crumbling into cubes of light, which scattered in the air, shrinking and melting.

Arrow Maker barely noticed.

Suddenly, she thought she understood.

She spoke rapidly. ‘Uvarov, listen. Please. The skydome above the forest
isn’t truly transparent
. It’s semisentient - it’s designed to deconvolve the distorting effects of the flight, to project an illusion of stars, of normal sky. Garry, can you hear me? The skydome shows a
reconstruction
of the sky - and I think you’ve
forgotten
that it’s a reconstruction. The forest people
can’t
have seen the stars.’ She tried to find words to reach this man, whom she’d first known a thousand years ago. ‘I’m sorry, Garry. I truly am. But you
must
make him turn back.’

‘Louise.’ Mark’s voice was clipped, urgent. ‘Arrow Maker is not responding. I’m starting to break up; we’re already within the exoticity field of the Interface, and—’

Uvarov screamed, ‘The Interface, Arrow Maker! You’ll travel back across five million years - tell them we’re here, that
we made it
. Arrow Maker!’

Now there were other voices on Uvarov’s link: a man, a girl ‘Maker! Maker! Come back . . .’

Mark’s voice faded out.

On Louise’s desk, the gleaming, toylike images, of pod and Interface, converged.

The blue-white framework was all around him now, its glow flooding the cabin of the pod with shadowless light and banishing the spine and lifedome, as if they were insubstantial. The pod shuddered, its framework glowing blue-violet.

The voice of Spinner-of-Rope, his daughter, became indistinct.

He called to her: ‘Look after your sister, Spinner-of-Rope.’

He couldn’t make out her reply. Soon there was only the tone of her dear voice, pleading, pressing.

A tunnel - lined by sheets of light, shimmering, impossibly long - opened out before him.

He sank into the golden pool, and even Spinner’s voice was lost.

Louise massaged her temples and closed her eyes. There was nothing more she could do. Not now.

She remembered how it had become clear - early in the flight, after a shockingly short time - that the
Northern
’s fragile artificial society was going to collapse. Mark had helped her understand the cramped social dynamics going on inside the lifedome: the dome contained a closed system, he said, with positive socio-feedback mechanisms leading to wild instabilities, and . . .

But understanding hadn’t helped them cope with the collapse.

The first rebellion had been inspired by one of Louise’s closest allies: Uvarov, who had led his eugenics-inspired withdrawal to the forest. After that Paradoxa - or rather, the Planners who had turned the original Paradoxa philosophy into a bizarre ideology - had subverted whatever authority Louise had retained and imposed its will on the remaining inhabitants of the lifedome.

Louise and Mark had withdrawn to this place: to the converted, secure
Great Britain
. From here Louise had isolated the starship’s essential systems - life support and control - from the inhabitants of the dome. During the long centuries since - long after Mark’s death, long after the occupants of the dome had forgotten her existence - she had watched over the swarming masses within the lifedome: regulating their air, ensuring the balance of the small, enclosed ecologies was maintained, guiding the ship to its final destination.

What the people did to each other, what they believed, was beyond her control. Perhaps it always had been. All she strove to do was to keep as many as possible of them alive.

But now, if the wormhole was lost, it had all been for nothing.
Nothing.

The kinetic energy of the pod shattered the spacetime flaw that was the wormhole. The portal behind it imploded at lightspeed, and gravititional waves and exotic particles pulsed around the craft.

Arrow Maker felt the air thicken in his lungs, cold settling over his bare skin. The pod jolted, and he was almost thrown out of his seat; calmly he unwrapped Spinner’s liana-rope from his waist and tied it around his torso and the seat, binding himself securely.

He held his hands before his face. He saw frost, glistening on his skin; his breath steamed in the air before him.

The pod’s fragile hull cracked and starred; one by one the craft’s systems - its heating, lights, air - collapsed under the hammer-blows of this impossible motion.

Through a transient network of wormholes which collapsed behind him in storms of heavy particles and gravity waves, Arrow Maker fell across past and future, the light of collapsing spacetime playing over his shivering flesh.

Light flared from the Interface. It gushed from every face of the tetrahedron like some liquid, bathing the
Northern
in violet fire.

It was like a small sun.

The starship shuddered. The steady glow of the GUTdrive flickered - actually flickered, for the first time in centuries. The
Britain
, old and fragile in its cradle, rocked back and forth, and Louise heard a distant clatter of falling objects, the incongruously domestic sound of sliding furniture.

All over the lifedome, lights flickered and died.

There was a box, drifting in space, tetrahedral, clear-walled.

From around an impossible corner a human walked into the box. He was dressed in treated animal skins. He was gaunt, encrusted in filth, his skin ravaged by frost.

He stared out at the stars, astonished.

L
ouise Ye Armonk stood on the pod’s short ladder. Below her, the ice of Callisto was dark, full of mysterious depths in the smoky Jovian ring-light.

She felt a starburst of wonder. For the first time in a thousand subjective years she was going to walk on the surface of a world.

She stepped forward.

Her feet settled to the ice with a faint crunch. Her boots left well-defined, ribbed prints in the fine frost which coated Callsto’s surface.

The thick environment suit felt heavy, despite the easiness of Callisto’s thirteen-per-cent-gee gravity. Louise lifted her hands and pressed her palms together; she was barely able to feel her hands within the clumsy gloves. The suit was a thousand years old. Trapped inside this thing she felt deadened, aged, as if she were forced to work within some glutinous fluid.

She looked around, peering through her murky faceplate, squinting to make out detail through the plate’s degraded image-enhancement. As her sense of wonder faded, she felt irritation grow; she knew it was weak of her, but, damn it, she
missed
the crystal clarity of her Virtual dioramas.

Jupiter and Sol were both below the little moon’s infinite-flat, icy horizon: but Jupiter’s new rings arced spectacularly out of the horizon and across the sky. The ring system’s far edge occluded the stars, razor-sharp, and the ice and rock particles of the rings sparkled milky crimson in the cool, distant sunlight.

The rings were like a huge artifact, she thought. Here, a mote on a plain of ice, she felt dwarfed to insignificance.

She tipped back her head and looked at the stars.

It had already been a year since the
Northern
’s speed had dropped sufficiently for the last relativistic effects to bleach from the Universe, a year in which they’d slowly coasted in from the outer System to Jupiter. The
Northern
had been in orbit around the Jovian moon for several days now, and Morrow had been working down here for most of that time. Preliminary scans from the
Northern
had told them that there was something buried inside the freshly frozen Callisto ice - something
anomalous
. Morrow, with his team of ‘bots, was trying to find out what that was.

But this was Louise’s own first trip down to the surface. And the experience of being immersed in a
sky -
a genuine, spread-out, distortion-free starry sky - was an unnerving novelty to Louise, after so long being surrounded by the washed-out starbow of near-lightspeed.

But what a sky it was - a dull, empty canopy of velvet, peppered by the corpses of stars: wizened, cooling dwarfs, the bloated hulks of giants - some huge enough to show a disc, even at interstellar distances - and, here and there, the traceries of debris, handfuls of spider-web thrown across the sky, which marked the sites of supernovas.

There was a grunt, and a diffuse shadow fell across the ice.

Louise turned. Spinner-of-Rope was making her slow, cautious way out of the pod after her. Spinner’s small body, made bulky by the suit, was silhouetted against the pod lights. She placed each footstep deliberately on the surface, and she held her arms out straight.

Louise grinned at Spinner. ‘You look ridiculous.’

‘Oh, thanks,’ Spinner said sourly. Through the dully reflective faceplate Louise could see the glint of Spinner’s spectacles, the glare of face paint, the white of Spinner’s teeth. Spinner said, ‘I just don’t want to go slip-sliding across this ice-ball of a moon.’

Louise looked down and scuffed the surface with her toe, leaving deep scratches. Within the ice she could see defects: planes, threads and star-shaped knots, imperfections left by the freezing process. ‘This is ice, but it’s not exactly smooth.’

Spinner waddled up to her and sniffed; the noise was like a scratch in Louise’s earpiece. ‘Maybe,’ Spinner said. ‘But it’s a lot smoother than it used to be.’

‘. . . Yes.’

‘Look,’ Spinner said, pointing. ‘Here comes the
Northern
.’

Louise turned and peered up, dutifully. The
Northern
, trailing through its hour-long orbit, was a thousand miles above the surface. Subvocally she ordered her faceplate to enhance the image. The ship became a remote matchstick, bright red in the light of Sol; it looked impossibly fragile, like some immense toy, she thought. The asteroid ice which had provided reaction mass for so long was a dark, anonymous lump, barely visible now that the great blue flame of the GUTdrive had been stilled after its thousand-year service. The spine, with its encrustation of antennae and sensor ports, was like an organic thing, bony, coated by bleached parasites. Red sunlight pooled like blood in the antennae cups. Still fixed to the spine was the wreckage of the wormhole Interface - twisted so that its tetrahedral form was lost beyond recognition, the electric-blue sparkle of its exotic matter frame dulled.

And the lifedome itself - eggshell-delicate - was huge atop that skinny spine, like the skull of a child. Most of the dome was darkened - closed up, impenetrable - but the upper few layers still glistened with light.

Within those bland walls, Louise reflected, two thousand people still went about their small, routine lives. Beyond Louise and her close companions, there were very few within the lifedome’s fragmented societies who even knew that the
Northern
’s immense journey was, at last, over.

‘How are you doing down there?’

She winced. The sudden voice in her ear had been raucous, overloud - another problem with this damn old suit.

‘Mark, I’m fine. How are you?’

‘What can you see? What are you thinking?’

‘Mostly I can see the inside of this faceplate. Couldn’t you have got it cleaned up? It smells like something’s been
living
in it for a thousand years.’

He laughed.

‘ . . . I see the stars. What’s left of them.’

‘Yes.’ Mark was silent for a moment. ‘Well, it’s just as we suspected from the deconvolved reconstructions during the flight . . . but never quite believed, maybe. It’s the same picture all over the sky, Louise; we’ve found no exceptions. It’s incredible. In the five million years of our flight, stellar evolution has been forced through at least five
billion
years. And the effect isn’t limited to this Galaxy. We can’t even
see
the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, for example.’

The sky was lowering, oppressive. She said, ‘Paradoxa got it about right, didn’t they? Remember the projections they showed us in the Virtual dome in New York, when they recruited us?’